While writing my previous post ‘Lead users, geeks, and freaks’ I started to realize that actually many innovations originate from what I defined as ‘lead users,’ people that solve a big problem for themselves. Here are a few:
- The Internet became big after HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he needed another way to present his research.
- The Camelbak was invented by a paramedic that found it too dangerous to reach for his drinking bottle while on his racing bike. He came up with the idea to sow an I.V. Bag into the back of his shirt.This evolved into a Camelbak.
- The sports bra was invented in 1970 by a Victoria Woodrow who just started jogging and was severely annoyed by here bouncing breasts.
- White-out liquid (Tipp-ex) was invented in the 1940′s by a secretary called Bette Nesmith Graham to fix her typing mistakes. She initially named the product “Mistake Out”
Of course there are other categories of innovation without the inventors having a problem. The most interesting being dreams and accidents. We would not have airplanes if nobody had dreamt of flying. If Sir Alexander Fleming had not accidentally left out one of the glass culture dishes in his lab, we would not have penicillin.
If you know of any interesting innovations from people solving their personal problem, feel free to add them in the comments section.
Piller stated that when most people say ‘lead user’ they are actually talking about very early adopters; geeks and freaks. The people that have the latest gadgets and tools are sometimes referred to as lead users. Understandable, because you could say they lead the masses into the adoption of the product. Very often some of these people also write reviews about their latest gadgets and become a subject matter expert (a leader). But they are not lead users.
